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“A Weekend Warrior: A person who holds a regular job during the week which restricts their ability to party/go on trips/partake in awesome activities, and thus plans epic weekend adventures to compensate.”

Aside of deciding on the countries and cities I wanted to vacation in, the three biggest things to plan for were flights, hotels, and what to do once I'm there. I have never been a huge travel bug. The biggest outing before coming to Korea was a flight to Florida from NYC when I was living in the Big Apple. I stayed with family, got picked up and everything was pretty much vanilla.

Now I live in South Korea, and I will be vacationing in Beijing and Bangkok come summer break in August. This is huge for me. Since being in Korea I've visited Tokyo and Seoul, but nothing other than that.

My current contract ends in late August which means summer vacation falls within the current cycle. In EPIK we receive 18 days vacation to be split between winter and summer breaks. It all works out well because those are pretty close to the actual number of days available after summer or winter camps are finished. The way it worked out this year, I have 8 vacation days available for summer. This break I knew it was time to get away and actually go on vacation. When I first arrived in Korea, THAT was a vacation in and of itself. Traveling abroad. New surroundings. Foreign land. Vacation!

Two years later, Korea is now my home away from home and time away is needed. I think any long-term foreign teacher needs to get away just to recharge the battery a bit. I love Korea - don't get me wrong. This experience has been the greatest. Sometimes though, the "Korean'ness" of Korea can get a little too Korean and you just need to check out for a while.

Newsweek Japan asked me to contribute an essay on Korean foreign policy for a special issue on current Northeast Asian tension. I also wrote the introductory essay for this special issue. There is one essay each on Japan, China, and Korea; mine is the Korean one. So this is a nice laymen’s review without too much fatiguing jargon.

Newsweek Japan asked me to write an introductory essay for its January 4 special issue on tension in Northeast Asia (cover story to the left). Here is the link in Japanese, but I thought it would be useful to publish the original, untranslated version as well. (If you actually want the Japanese language version, email me for it please.)

Bloomberg has put together a well reported and extensive look at what appears to have been a 5-year long game of cat and mouse-hack and evade with servers containing some of the U.S. military’s most sensitive and highly-coveted technology.

If F-22′s and F-35′s start dropping out of the sky during the Asian apocalypse in the Taiwan Strait, now you know why.